Does it pay to smoke? / by an old smoker.

  • James Parton
Date:
[1872?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Does it pay to smoke? / by an old smoker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    bodily health. Go, on some festive day, to 44 Jones’s Woods,’’ where yon may sometimes see five thousand Germans—men, women, and children —amusing themselves in their simple and rational way. Not one face in ten has the clear, bright look of health. Nearly all the faces have a certain tallowy aspect,—yellowish in colour, with a dull shine upon them. You perceive plainly that it is not well with these good people; they are not con¬ forming to nature’s requirements; they are not the Germans of Tacitus,—ruddy, tough, happy, and indomitable. To lay the whole blame of this de¬ cline upon smoking, which is only one of many bad habits of theirs, would be absurd. What I insist upon is this : Smoking, besides doing its part toward lowering the tone of the bodily health, deadens our sense of other physical evils, and makes us submit to them more patiently. If our excellent German fellow-citizens were to throw away their pipes, they would speedily toss their cast-iron sausages after them, and become more fastidious in the choice of air for their own and their children’s breathing, and reduce their daily allowance of lager-bier. Their first step toward physical regeneration will be, must be, the suppression of the pipe. One hopeful sign for the future is, that this
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